


Machine Heart

by quickreaver



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Dystopian, M/M, Slice of Life, android!Jared, animated sex dolls, machinist!Jensen, near future AU, toast in the machine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:20:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22064653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quickreaver/pseuds/quickreaver
Summary: Jensen loves machines. What happens when a machine loves him back?
Relationships: Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki
Comments: 27
Kudos: 82
Collections: SPN J2 Xmas Exchange





	Machine Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cherie_morte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherie_morte/gifts).



> My delightful, dear [cherie_morte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherie_morte), I don't know why I thought I should write you a fic when I'm so out of practice and you're such a brilliant writer and I'm late and I'm shooting myself in the foot here. I've completely forgotten how to build a story, unaided by the fact I'm writing this note after a bottle of prosecco. Happy New Year, my darling! *throws a pan of water*

The vaguely religious odor of solder drifts up Jensen's nose as sparks jump from the motherboard. He squints and swears, licks a stinging finger. He needs better glasses for this finicky job. The workshop stinks of incense and stale machine oil, he's not smelling particularly fresh himself, and this fucking finicky motherboard won't put its goddamn self back together. He must've been a right asshole in a previous life to deserve this lot. Karmic justice works that way, if one believed in that bullshit.

Putting aside the soldering iron, he shoves his glasses up into his hair, takes a moment to rub his face. Hopes he doesn't have anything on his hands that'll burn his eyeballs out. Stares across the workshop and lets his gaze lose focus and rest for a moment.

It's been raining all day and doesn't feel like it'll stop just because the sun has set. Drops jitter down the storefront window, refracting streetlights. Jensen exhales pointedly. The weather suits his mood, all the more when the rain turns to sleet.

Slow night. People won’t be venturing out in this sludge with their busted electronics, just like yesterday, and the day before. Might as well eat. There's left-over fried chicken in the 'fridge in the office, congealed mashed potatoes and gravy, and some sort of green putty that passes for vegetable product. He throws a whiskey instead of a beer in there to shake things up.

As he lifts his plastic fork, a shadow passes across the storefront window and the broken bell over the door rattles.

So much for dinner.

Even better, it's Chad.

Jensen exhales, long suffering. Before he can get one word out, Chad has his hands up and a desperate grin on his grimy face.

“Peace offering?”

Jensen feels his eyes narrow and a brow arch. Chad's grin slips.

“Come on, Jensen, man. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, okay? I didn't know the stuff was hot last time, I swear. On my mother's grave—”

“Your mother's still alive, asshole.”

“Fair enough, true, true. Figure of speech. But if she was dead, I'd swear on her, okay? I'd swear on her rotting, worm-infested—”

“Fine. Jesus. Shut up. Why are you here?”

Chad leans his arms on the countertop that keeps customers out of Jensen's workshop. Raps his beat-up knuckles on the cracked Formica. “I got you a good haul. Quality parts.” Which is exactly what he'd said before, and the haul ended up being pirated AI and black-market accessories, some of which still had their serial numbers intact. Chad got stupid when he got desperate.

“ _Clean_ parts? Because if I have to go through what I went through last time...”

Chad's mouth is already working on excuses.

“...I will end you, Murray.” But Jensen has to admit to curiosity; every once in a blue moon, Chad brings him primo goods. Rarities. Obscure, vintage hardware that collectors paid big credits for.

“The wagon's out back, man. All you gotta do is look. You'll see, you'll see.” Chad's grinning again. At some point since their last deal, Chad has lost a tooth.

Jensen wipes his hands on a rag and huffs, turns and heads towards the rear of the shop. “You, go around the back,” he orders, because no way is Chad getting behind the counter. The bell over the door rattles again as Chad obeys.

Behind the shop, the alley sits dry and sheltered by overhangs and fire-escapes. The city wails around them. Chad has backed his wagon there, so cock-sure Jensen would take the bait.

It's little more than a metal box on two wheels open to the elements, towed behind a car that has long since lost any identity, rusted and quilted together with scraps of metal from a dozen different models. When he's certain he's got Jensen's attention, Chad pulls a blue tarp away with a flourish. Jensen flinches at the sudden spray of dirty water in his face, but Chad is oblivious. He's gesturing like a game-show host to the pile of electronics, wires and cords porcupining out from the heap.

As much as Jensen is loathe to admit, it is a good haul ... providing nothing is stolen (or reported as such). He notes some retro collectables, a solid handful of mechanicals he can use immediately as well as several flesh-colored neo-real animatronic pieces that make the whole pile look like a bloodless murder scene. Jensen finds androids generally creepy, but they're also in high demand. He's no slouch at reassembling dolls that seem near enough to human for whatever need might arise, if you squinted and didn't look at the seams.

People are lonely and easy, these days. Not that he’d know.

“All right, fine.”

Chad barely resists a victory fist-pump.

“Five hundred credits,” Jensen says.

“Six.”

“Four.”

“Okay, okay, five.”

“Four-fifty.”

“Dude, you just—”

“Don't argue with me, Murray, or you'll get jack squat and another missing tooth.”

“Four-seventyfive?”

Jensen turns to leave and Chad blurts out a “Four-fifty. DEAL.”

Sucker. The pile is worth at least eight-hundred. Jensen pretends to look unhappy about it as he pulls out his wallet and forks over the payment. Chad takes the paper money—currency of the underground—and helps unload the wagon into the back of Jensen's shop, then slips away before Jensen can make like he's changing his mind. It's the little game they play.

♦♦♦♦♦

Jensen locks up the shop for the night and re-warms dinner.

He typically sorts Chad's hauls into three piles: waste, utilitarian parts, and what-the-fuck-do-I-do-with-this-shit. Chad accumulates a lot of the latter category, but it's not always a bad thing. Jensen has a bit of a reputation as a purveyor of the obscure. You don't visit his shop if you're just looking to have a vacuum repaired. It sits in a grim and dubious part of the city, in an alley off another alley, and Jensen doesn't advertise. If you need his business, you have to ask the right people, grease the right palms.

As he begins to dig through the booty, he can focus on the profit it'll bring and not the guttering of an overhead light, not the novelty of having something else to do besides drink himself into whatever stupor passes for sleep most nights. He cracks open a beer regardless, and picks up a motherboard, turning it over in his hands to assess the damage. Drops it in the 'waste' pile. There are cell phones and monitors and chrome detailing from what looks like an old Chevy; he sets them more carefully in the spot for refurbishing. Gears. Gewgaws and gimcracks. Some sort of gaming console. He almost startles when he sees pale fingers poking from the mouth of a microwave oven, because he never gets used to doll parts. The uncanny valley of rubber playing at being human skin makes the hair on the back of his neck prickle every time.

He puts the entire faux hand behind his back, out of view. Eventually, he finds an arm. Torso. Head in a grocery bag. The whole automaton is there, in pieces, and he wonders if Chad had dismantled it so Jensen wouldn't think it was stolen. Knowing that fucker, yeah.

The pieces are relatively undamaged at first examination, further supporting his theory that Chad had chopped it up no earlier than yesterday. Jensen sighs; he can't do a damned anything with a hot android. And given the sharp, handsome features on the decapitated head—hot in a whole other sense—it was probably used for something notable. A doorman, receptionist, possibly a pleasure model, since it was hung like the proverbial horse. It might've pulled double duty; these machines weren't cheap.

Out of morbid curiosity, he sets the arms and legs around the torso in their proper spots, frowns as he flips open the eyelids with his thumb. The pupils are fixed wide and black, irises full of artsy brown/blue striations and framed by angular brows. High end. He wedges the head against the neck stump and turns the face to the side, to stare at the corner of the shop.

Jensen pulls a grease-stained bandanna out of his pocket and floats it on top of the crotch, for no legitimate reason except that it's starting to look too much like an actual carcass.

♦♦♦♦♦

The next morning, Jensen wakes up to half a foot of snow lazily turning to slush. It slows business again, which he doesn’t particularly mind given that he’d rather keep the company of machines than customers on any given day. He’s the best machinist on this side of the city and that’s what keeps the lights on, not his sparkling wit or delight in his fellow man.

He stares out the front window into the anemic glow of morning for a solid minute, listening to the building creak. Watches a single car crawl by. Sighs. Having paid that token respect to the gods of commerce, he sets out the cardboard sign that reads “Ring for Service” even if he doesn’t have a desk bell, and slips off to the workshop.

There’s a sound system some guy dropped off, the speakers expelling noises like an angry man gargling underwater, he could begin work on that. Or he could organize fuses and chips. Or pay bills or send slackers to collections (or write them off, depending on how thoroughly they annoyed him).

Or he could try to piece together a fake man.

“Well, looks like it’s just you and me, kid,” he says, crouching to pick up the head. The eyes have slid closed, probably some failsafe to protect the lenses. “Don’t suppose you’re much of a conversationalist at the moment. Cool. I like ‘em strong, silent, with a hard drive.”

While Jensen is good, automatons are difficult to get right, what with the ‘uncanny valley’ effect. It’s natural to be creeped out by things that are so close to human but yet _not quite_. Defense mechanism to masquerading predators and all.

Where to begin is a bit of a challenge, so he puts on a pot of coffee, places the well-proportioned head on a shelf and hefts the torso onto the workbench to set about reattaching the limbs, which he figures might be the best place to start. If you don’t have a feasible body to attach the head to, there’s no point in keeping any of it except as spare parts.

The torso is long and chiseled, cruising down to narrow hips. Defined Adonis belt. Definitely feasible. Jensen has a distinct flash of appreciation; if he could design abs like these for a fuck toy, why wouldn’t he? A treasure trail of brown synthetic hair leads to the sizable dick, no faux foreskin, but it’s been pierced with a discrete, chrome Prince Albert. Well, that was a detail Jensen had missed earlier. Answers the burning question as to the android’s job history. He pokes at the smoothly arched cock, watches it bob to humor himself.

The big shoulder joints fit snugly, clusters of pseudo-muscle notching together like monkey bread. Good start. The hands are wide-palmed and long-fingered, wrists maybe on the delicate side for an android this tall. Well over six feet, from what Jensen can guess, but he’ll know better when he gets the legs in place. One bent finger requires a little impromptu splinting while the solder sets, and there’s dark red under the fingernails that Jensen hopes like hell is rust. He’ll scrub it out with 409 later.

He notes some previous repair work on the skin over one broad pec, gouges and scrapes that have been carelessly patched with the wrong color. Amateurs. He knows a guy who knows another guy who can match the silicone exactly. Jensen gingerly slices off the discolored sections with an exacto knife and tosses them in the trash bin, but saves a tiny square of the correct hue for match-up. The impromptu surgery leaves an odd hole, right over where the heart might’ve been.

“Hrmm. Should I get you reskinned, head to toe? Give you a San Tropez tan?” Jensen murmurs to himself, slides his glasses to the tip of his nose. “No one has a tan anymore, yanno. Skin cancer. But you ain’t gotta worry about that, do you? Lucky bastard.” He articulates an elbow, satisfied that it bends properly. “But a tattoo, maybe. Whatcha think? ‘Mother’? An anchor? Maybe ‘Jensen was here’?”

Unsurprisingly, he gets no opinion on the matter. 

It takes Jensen an entire pot of coffee and several hours, almost three, to get the legs slotted into the hip sockets properly and fiddle with a sloppy ankle. There’s quite a bit of damage to the exterior of one knee, and he figures now would be a good time to pick up that custom-blended silicone. He’s going to need a fair bit of it, more than at first glance. The ‘skin’ at the wrists and ankles shows wear and tear, abraded areas that look suspiciously like bloodless rope burns. 

“Good thing you can’t feel, buddy.” Someone rode this robot hard.

He glances at his phone and decides to grab lunch while he’s out. His belly is complaining and his hands are getting twitchy from all the caffeine; he could use some outdoor air, fresh or not. Tucking the android’s arms against its torso, Jensen drapes the whole table with a paint-stained sheet. Thinks it feels like a morgue in here now; all they need is a toe-tag.

♦♦♦♦♦

Two protein patty burgers and a real beer later, Jensen returns to the shop carting a gallon of artificial ‘skin’ in a metal canister. As his numb fingers fumble with the code lock on the door, he notices a slip of brown paper on the ground, soaked through. Just barely sees writing that’s survived the slush. When he picks it up, he rolls his eyes. Genevieve stopped by, apparently. Why she still bothers with him, he’ll never know. They’ve been neighbors for years; young widow who manages the Polish diner at the end of the block. Petite, dark hair and eyes, bites her lip a lot when she’s stressed.

They tried to be a thing once upon a time, but Jensen doesn’t do well with “things”. People are twisty and inconvenient. He also knows he’s emotionally constipated on a good day, and somehow being with Genevieve made him feel even more of a pretzel. Like the universe was waiting to tie him in knots so he cut the threads preemptively, beat it to the punch, all those tired but apropos metaphors. And for some reason, she still stopped by to see if he wanted surplus pierogies or hadn’t left the building in a month. At first, it seemed like a good idea to rehab a studio apartment over the shop, but turns out it made it way too easy for him to sequester for weeks at a chunk.

“The deep fryer is on the fritz,” the note reads. “Stop by for dinner and I’ll feed you, Grinch.” 

Oh yeah. It’s almost Christmas. Huh.

Jensen wads up the note and pushes his way into the store. Checks the old-school answering machine, deletes a telemarketing call, and heads back to the workshop to drop off the canister.

It’s still disconcerting to see the sheeted, body-shaped lump on the workbench, even moreso since a hand has flopped out from under the cover, gesturing, pale and flaccid, towards the floor.

“You are one creepy sumbitch,” Jensen says, peeling back the sheet. The eyes have popped open, as if it wasn’t already weird enough. He sweeps his palm over the fringe of lashes and the lids close.

Then he hangs up his scarf and coat, cracks his knuckles, and sets about patching the hole over the android’s not-heart, the trashed knee, a handful of other punctures and nicks and injuries of dubious cause. It’s slow going because people are starting to come into the store, now that the streets aren’t as slick and the urgency of Christmas gifting is demanding refurbished phones and gaming consoles.

Wan daylight eventually creeps across the concrete floor of the shop, as the sun makes its way through clouds to sink behind tall buildings, leaving dusk in its wake. Jensen settles into the familiar listlessness of late-day winter, that tenuous time between supper and fighting sleep. The shop officially closes at 8; he locks the door at 7:53. Turns off the lights front-of-house, turns on the answering machine. Pours a conciliatory double whiskey. 

The sharp light over the workbench gives the room a surgical theatre vibe. When Jensen removes the sheet this time, the eyes have stayed closed but the lips have drifted apart.

“You trying to tell me something? You got something to say?” Jensen pushes his thumb down on the chin to open the mouth wider, revealing straight white teeth and a pierced tongue. He huffs and mumbles, “No, no, no.” Who gets their tongue pierced? It makes you lisp and risks cracking teeth. The only people he’s known to get their tongues pierced were fucked-up junkies in the alley off 18th Street. Sure, everyone’s got a kink and androids don’t have to worry about dental hygiene, but Jensen doesn’t much care for it so he wrangles the barbell from the eerily soft, pink tongue and tosses the bit of metal into the trash with a tinny _plink_. But he leaves the Prince Albert as is.

“There. Better. Now you don’t look like a douche.” Really though, the android seemed too refined for douchery. Jensen reasons that it had been stolen and treated poorly at some point before Chad got his hands on it. Grabbing a container of saniwipes, Jensen plucks one from the top and begins buffing dirt smudges from the android’s smooth forehead.

“What’d you used to do, huh, bud? Make martinis for bored bankers’ wives? No? Drive trust fund kids around town? Maybe you … ” Jensen squints and cleans the fingernails with the tiniest screwdriver he owns, one finger at a time, “ … were a mannequin. Escort. Chaperone. Hostess with the mostess—”

A sharp clicking at the shop’s front door snaps him from his ruminations. “We’re closed!” he shouts, even though there’s no real ‘we’ unless he counted Mr. Roboto here, but the rapping persists. He tosses a wad of saniwipes and rubs his palms down the front of his shirt, annoyed.

Of course it’s Genevieve, her nose pressed against the window and mittened hands cupped around her face to scowl into the store. Jensen makes a show of rolling his eyes and lets her in.

“When I said I needed the fryer fixed, I didn’t mean tomorrow,” she scolds, brushing fresh snow from her hair. She smells like perfume and kielbasa. “And you need dinner. What’s the big deal keeping you holed up this time? You’re not Santa Claus, not even close.” She slips past him—as is her way—and makes for the workshop because it’s warmer back there and she’s just that nosy. All. The. Time.

She stops dead.

“What the fuck?” Her eyes are wide and she’s starting to grin. “You got a _boy toy_?”

Jensen bumps her shoulder, but he feels his ears heating up. “What? No, I bought a pile of junk and all the pieces-parts were in there. I’m putting it back together again.”

“ _Him_ ,” she corrects, stepping closer with a pointed gesture to the android’s sizable package. 

Jensen can’t argue with her there. “Fine. Him.”

“Who’d you buy him from anyways?”

“You don’t wanna—”

“Chad?!”

“Maybe.”

“Ew.”

“Yeah, well.”

Genevieve hovers over the workbench, staring at the body as though expecting it to move. She pokes one of the android’s cheeks, right in a dimple. “What’s his name?”

Jensen shrugs. This wasn’t a pet; didn’t occur to him to name it. Him. Whatever.

“Well, what do you call him? Don’t they come with names? I don’t know how owning one of these guys works,” she says.

“You think I do? I don’t care, you name him.”

“Oh, come on, Jen.”

“No, you come on, Gen.”

She elbows him, cants her head. Thinks on it a few seconds. “Jared.”

“ _Jared_?”

“Why not?”

“Fair.”

“Does he work?”

Now it’s Jensen’s turn to ponder. “Well, let’s find out.”

There’s a small but somewhat complicated switch up under the android’s—Jared’s—hairline at the nape of the neck. Jensen pulls up on the heavy shoulders and bends Jared at the waist, and the big body flops forward not unlike an unconscious man. Genevieve steps back with a small contemplative hum. Peeks around Jensen to keep her gaze trained on the face.

Filtering through the mess of dark brown hair, Jensen finds the switch and fiddles and manipulates it just so. Then he waits. They both wait. And they listen for something, anything … a hum of circuits, the whir of a drive booting up. But there’s nothing.

“Well, shit,” Genevieve says.

“Eh. I bet his battery is dead.”

“So charge him!”

Jensen gives Genevieve a pained look but he knows she won’t let up—her expression confirms as much—so he grunts and hip-checks her out of the way. There’s a tiny compartment at the small of the android’s back, and Jensen slides it open to see which sort of adapter it requires. He digs through a drawer full of cords and finds the right fit in a great knot, tugging and swearing until it pulls free. With a _snick_ , he slips one end into the port and the other into an electrical socket. Tries the switch up under the hairline again, but there’s not so much as a shudder of so-called life.  
  
“Sorry,” he says insincerely.

With a flip of her coat, Genevieve is already heading back to the business end of the shop. “Oh well. You tried. Let’s go fix a fryer.” 

♦♦♦♦♦

Jensen jolts awake, uncertain why. He should be sleeping like the proverbial rock after all the pierogies and wine at dinner but suddenly, he’s not. Blinking through bleary eyes and mush for a brain, he hears another sharp, heavy thump from downstairs. Says, “Shit,” under his breath, adrenaline waking him right the fuck up. 

He flops over and hits the touchscreen sitting next to a bottle of aspirin on his bedside table. It flickers to life as Jensen fumbles with his glasses; a quad of black and white images materialize onto the small monitor, broadcasting from an old teddybear nanny-cam aimed at the shop’s front. The windows there seem to be intact, and they’re the only windows in the shop. The door is untouched as well, the alarm wired to the hinges silent, nothing moving by the register.

Swiping left, the view switches to the back, the service entrance to the alley. The dented steel door sits solemn and deadbolted, sealed tight, no shadows shifting in the corners of the scene. 

He doesn’t get many break-ins, because the shop is hard to find and he pummeled the living daylights out of the last person who tried to rob him. Word gets around, and melee is far more satisfying and dependable than flying bullets.

But he heard what he heard, twice apparently, and there’s got to be someone down there, or one hell of a big rat.

Jensen tosses his glasses onto the pillow and reaches under the bed, his hand wrapping around the grip of a customized, steel-banded Louisville Slugger. Slipping into an old robe, he pockets his phone even though calling the cops to this side of town would hardly result in a quick response, and uses the ambient glow from various small appliances to light his way.

There’s another clatter, like screws scattering across the cement floor downstairs. He pads barefoot down the cold metal staircase to the shop; a step creaks and he freezes. Hears something that sounds like sloppy footfalls, maybe a bag being dragged, then silence that stretches on. He treads more carefully this time.

The staircase bottoms out into a small office space, where he usually makes out the bills and purchasing orders and collections. It’s just a messy as he left it, and he doesn’t keep the safe in there because how obvious would that be? The safe is in a storeroom behind giant jugs of bottled water, a big enough pain-in-the-ass to move that no one would bother, not even Jensen most days. He crosses the room, holding his breath as he presses against a wall to peek around the corner.

The door to the storeroom is still closed, locked and quiet. He slinks onward, towards the workroom. Hoists the bat to his shoulder.

And something moves there, around the dark workbench. Something man-shaped, barely visible in the scant citylight that issues from the front-of-house.

It— _he_ —must hear Jensen because the head slowly pivots and the eyes flash a reflected glow.

“Holy shit.” Jensen stares. 

The android stares back, leaning heavily on the workbench, just as naked as Jensen had left him. “I. Woke up.” The voice warbles like something broken and rattling loose. “I think. My. Knee dislocated when. I fell off—”

Jensen cringes and lifts his hand for silence because damn, that weird almost-human voice is giving him the heebs. The android stops talking immediately. Still stares though, the pupils reflecting like an animal’s.

Stepping closer, Jensen is leary of lowering the bat, out of habit, instinct. The head follows Jensen’s progress as he rounds the workbench, and it becomes clear from the android’s silhouette that one knee is popped out at a disconcerting angle. He’s taller than Jensen by a good few inches now that he’s standing, but Jensen figures he can use the bat to take out the other knee, if need be.

Jensen reaches over and hits the light switch. White LED glare fills the workshop, and he flinches as his eyes adjust but Jared just keeps staring.

“I’m. Sorry I didn’t. Mean—”

“Seriously, man, I can’t with that voice right now.”

If Jensen didn’t know better, he’d think Jared seemed vaguely apologetic, the way his gaze flits away to some midground stare.

_Well, shit._

Uncanny valley be damned, Jensen huffs and finally puts the bat aside. He gives the android a hard stare, then wheels over an old office chair. “Sit.”

Which Jared does, neatly folding his hands in his lap, for which Jensen is grateful. There’s no way to ignore that Jared’s cock is remarkably realistic, and easily proportional to how long he is everywhere else. It’s … distracting, now that he’s awake.

“Tilt your head back,” Jensen orders.

Which Jared also does, without hesitation.

Jensen fishes spare reading glasses from one of the many spots he’s got them stored about the place, and waxes clinical over the damage to the sweep of throat. It’s been pointedly mashed on either side of the ‘larynx’ and if he can pop it back out again, give the pseudo-voicebox room to vibrate and do its job, he hopes the speakers won’t rattle against the housing and sound so freaking bizarre. It’s also vaguely annoying that can’t resist visualizing how this damage came to be.

He holds the exacto knife up where Jared can see it. “Will this, uh, hurt?”

“No,” Jared garbles with a single slow blink.

“Alrighty then. In we go.” Regardless, it’s discomfiting to slice into the neck of something that’s starting to look so very human, as Jensen exposes the inner workings and gets his fingers into the casing to bend the gullet back into shape.

“Someone sure got into choking, huh.” Yes, he just said that out loud.

Jared blinks twice, which Jensen takes as either surprise or confirmation. A few more tweaks and nudges and fiddling, and Jensen closes up the flap of skin. Runs a finger down the throat long-wise to seal the edges. The android seems to shiver, but maybe that’s just an autonomic adjustment habit.

“Say something.”

“Something,” Jared says. It comes out suede-y and light. There’s even a programmed hint of US Southern twang that drops the ‘g’.

Jensen uses his fingertips to smooth a bit of silicone over the seam; the surface warms under his touch. Another clever feature. This is easily the most refined automaton that’s passed through the shop in recent memory. Taking a fist and popping the knee joint back into place, Jensen feels momentarily smug with himself. “Well I am a genius, then. You’re fixed.”

Slowly dropping his chin, Jared turns his head side to side, up and down, then smiles: a broad ridiculous gesture that Jensen finds himself repeating until he realises it and mentally kicks himself.

He clears his throat, to cover. “So. What’s your name? What do I call you?”

“The woman called me Jared. That works.” When Jensen arches a brow, Jared quirks another smile. With dimples. Clearly they spared no expense on this design. If only Chad had known. “Back-up battery. So I don’t lose all my customized settings. Like an alarm clock, you know?” 

“Oh. Sure. Of course. I knew that.”

“I’m sure you did.”

Sarcasm, even? Jensen forces a scowl, gesticulates at Jared’s nakedness. “You need—”

“A hand? Be my guest.”

“No! Pants. Do you need pants?” _Smart ass. Who programmed this fucker?_ Definitely a pleasure model.

“Not particularly, unless it makes you uncomfortable. Do I make you uncomfortable? I can warm the temperature of my skin to whatever comfort level you like. It’s a neat party trick.” He lifts one hand off his lap and holds it out to Jensen. Waiting.

“I believe you.”

“I don’t bite. Unless you’re into that.” Jared inches his hand forward. 

“Oh, for fucks’s sake, fine.”

He grabs Jared’s hand, hard. Not that it should matter to a machine, but Jared’s brows tug down when the fingers crush like sinew, and Jensen instantly feels bad.

God dammit, no way is he falling for this garbage. Jensen surrounds himself with machines because they ask nothing of him that he doesn’t want to give. They don’t get insulted or make demands or have fears or whine about hangnails or broken fryers, even if you’ve worked on or ignored them for days. They sit patiently until you need them. Uncomplaining. Unconditional.  
  
Jensen loosens his grip slightly.

The cold skin seeps up to room temperature then warms considerably, even turning pinkish. Softens. Jared curls his fingers into Jensen’s palm.

With a jerk, Jensen pulls his hand back, flustered. His pulse has ticked up a beat or five, and from Jared’s ghost of a smile, he’s got the calibrations to discern it. Jared was probably aware when Jensen went over the his dick with saniwipes and keen interest the other day, too.

“I think you need those pants now,” Jensen mumbles.

“Um, oh. Okay?”

Jensen backs out of the workshop and takes the stairs to the apartment two at a time. 

He is, indeed, falling for this garbage. Not that Jared is garbage; he isn’t. That’s not the garbage Jensen is considering. Jared is what he is: a high-end almost-man, full of pricey parts and clever algorithms. That’s it; that’s the whole of it.

Jensen rakes his hand through his hair, dislodging his glasses, and scoffs at himself, at his foolishness. Just because his libido might be more than a little interested in exploring Jared’s expertise doesn’t mean he’s hurting the guy’s feelings. Only one person has feelings in this relationship and it’s not the strategically designed assortment of hard-and-software sitting naked on an old office chair downstairs. _So get your shit together, Ackles._

A minute of pacing and several swigs of breakfast whiskey later, Jensen feels more like himself. He chooses a pair of sleep pants because they might be long enough, but not slip off the android’s hips without a belt. No sense in slippers; Jared can warm his own damned feet, but a comb might be in order.

Thus fortified, his resolution and pride intact, Jensen returns with his goods to the workroom to find an empty seat. A quick scan of the area reveals the unplugged cord and little else.

“Jared!”  
  
No response.

Jensen drops the sleep pants on the workbench and heads to the front of the store but everything is still locked up tight.

“Where the fuck.” Rhetorical, really. He passes back through the workroom, peeks in the office to find nothing changed, before he realizes he feels a hit of cold city air on his chest. He belts his robe tight and jogs past the storeroom to the rear exit. The metal door sits wide open, dawn eking in from the alley.  
  
Snow pelts him in the face as he pokes his head out and the entire experience is incredibly unpleasant. He shoots a glare one way, then the other, and there, sitting on a trash can twenty-ish feet away, is a tall, naked man. Staring at nothing.

Jensen rolls his eyes and crosses his arms over his chest, shouting into the squall. “What. Are. You. Doing.”

But the android doesn’t so much as blink.

“Goddammit, Jared, I’m barefoot and I do not have an internal furnace. Get in here.”

No response.

Jensen pops back inside, returning in slippers and a winter coat. He’s not entirely stupid.

Shoulders curled against the weather and eyes watering from the wind, he slops his way through the gray alley snow and stops in front of Jared. His feet are frozen already.

“Wake up,” Jensen says. “Dude, I know you can hear me and unless this is some monumental glitch, please do not make me carry your sorry ass back to the shop.”

Finally, Jared stirs. Just a finger, but it’s proof of sort-of life. There’s snow sticking all over him, unmelted. “I was thinking.” 

“Out here? Now? Can we think inside?”

Jared stalls out again, lips pinched.

“Seriously, what is this about?”

“You’re a good man, Jensen.”

“What?” Jensen blinks, incredulous. 

“You brought me back to life. Like Gepetto.”

_God, please don’t let anyone—Chad, Genevieve, anyone—happen down the alley._

“I’m just a machine. But you showed me kindness…” Jared touches the spot over his heart.

“Shut up. You’re programmed to say shit like this.”

“No,” Jared snaps.

Jensen narrows his eyes. “No?”

“Sorry. I … just a minor malfunction. I guess.”

So this was probably why Jared wound up in a trash heap. “It’s okay. But I’m freezing my balls off—” 

“Are you going to sell me?”

Jensen’s not sure how to answer this one.

Jared lifts his gaze and there’s something painfully human in it. The way the brows cant and the lips part and the snow clings to his lashes. “I need to know. If you’re just going to unload me in an after-Christmas sale, I won’t waste the memory adjusting my algorithms to your preferences. I’ll just, I dunno. I mean I get it, if you need to. But.”  
  
If Jensen’s honest with himself, the thoughts zinging through his shivering brain are not solely based on wanting to get someplace warm, and not solely limited to his brain. He’s not sure where this is heading or whether it’s going to get weird, well, _weirder_ , but his mouth moves and words come out. “No. No, I won’t sell you.”

“For real?”

“For real. So can we—”

Jared stands up fast and his big, warmed hands press to either side of Jensen’s face and before Jensen can so much as flinch, Jared is kissing him. His tongue is hotter than a crossed wires and he’s pressing into Jensen’s personal space and in that moment, Jared feels nothing like a machine.

It doesn’t take but a heartbeat for Jensen’s body to get on board, an autonomic revelation. He gives not a single fuck that Jared isn’t flesh and blood.

Nor does it take much time at all for an obnoxious wolf whistle to echo from the other end of the alley. Bet it’s fuucking Chad, at the god-damned asscrack of dawn.

Jensen pulls back, licks the heat off his lips. “Can we _please_ go inside now?”

Jared nuzzles at Jensen’s neck, slips arms into the robe to rest on Jensen’s hips. Doesn’t say a single damned word.

  
  



End file.
